Laboriously, Europeans finally managed, on Monday March 11, to agree on the fate of workers on digital platforms, such as Uber or Deliveroo. It took more than two years of negotiations for a qualified majority of fifteen member states, representing 65% of the population of the Old Continent, to support a text which now obliges the Twenty-seven to create a legal and refutable presumption of employment in their respective rights, leaving them free to define the conditions.
The formal vote will take place in a few days but the social affairs ministers, who met on Monday in Brussels, expressed their position on this occasion, and its outcome is no longer in doubt.
With the rise of platforms, Europeans wanted to harmonize and improve the working conditions of a poorly regulated sector which today employs 28 million people – in 2025, there should be 43 million – and puts them to work, in 90% of cases, with independent status without this always being justified.
Transition to employment
According to the Commission, today, 5.5 million drivers and other delivery workers listed as non-salaried should in reality be so, given the relationship of subordination which attaches them to their employer, and thus access the related rights in terms of salary, leave, health insurance or even retirement and unemployment rights.
In December 2021, the Commission proposed creating a presumption of employment as soon as certain of the criteria it had retained (level of remuneration, remote supervision of services, imposed working hours, obligation to accept a mission, wearing a uniform or even a ban on working for another company) were met.
But the two co-legislators – the European Parliament and the member states – have not managed to agree on this logic. The MEPs wanted to relax the conditions of the presumption of employment compared to what the community executive planned when the Twenty-seven wanted to tighten them.
Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, where there are many self-employed people and where legal disputes on this subject have increased, were in favor of the Commission’s proposal. Germany, in the absence of an agreement between the partners of Olaf Scholz’s coalition, had warned that it would abstain, making it more difficult to obtain a qualified majority among the member states.
Paris, isolated
As for France, which is the European country where there are the most platforms, it defended a system based on the model of what it does at home: the revaluation of the rights of independent workers rather than the reclassification of their contract of work, while the status of employee in France is relatively rigid. Paris finally accepted the logic of a presumption of employment, but, in return, demanded stricter criteria than those of the Commission.
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